Mr Abbott, keep God out of politics

Anson Cameron

The prime minister spoke recently to an audience of loggers. I can't decide whether it was merely deluded or a snide declaration of war against the Greens because they collaborated with Labor against him. Was he abasing himself for votes before woodchippers or unveiling a scorched earth policy?

Worryingly, he namechecked God. Before the election, Tony Abbott's deity was rarely mentioned. His advisers would have warned him against co-opting his Lord into a campaign in which a quarter of Australians have no god, almost half a million are Muslim, and even like-minded believers are squeamish about declaring for a personally interventionist god.

But now that Abbott is, temporarily, beyond the electorate, he routinely mentions God. And why not? God is endorsing his policies.

In his speech to the woodchippers, Abbott referred to the Greens as ''the devil'' and hammered out an Old Testament/Manifest Destiny notion that ''the environment is meant for man''.

Abbott looked out at the audience and said: ''I don't see people who are environmental bandits, I see people who are the ultimate conservationists. I salute you. You intelligently make the most of the good things God has given us.''

Since the audience he was addressing had been subsidised to wage war with greenies, and cut down Australia's forests and send them as woodchips to Japan and China for toilet paper since the '70s, one wonders whether this ''ultimate conservationist'' remark came off as praise or insult. A wave of double-takes must have run through the chippers.

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A priori statement such as the PM's proves nothing and justifies whatever you want. It is neither a sensible nor defensible argument.

Abbott's god says cut down the forests. Well, my neighbour Wendy had a visitation from her god telling her he didn't want any more of Australia's forests cut down, so godly opinion stands at one-all. No side has stolen any ground from the other, unless Tony thinks Wendy's god is a fraud, a false prophet that trails along at the behest of her heart. Which is more or less what I think his god does. I'd like to ask him: How many of your policies does your god disagree with, Mr Abbott? If the answer is ''none'', is he an elephant stamp or an estimable deity?

The religious justification of political acts sends a shiver down my spine. A god is telling the PM it's OK to start up the chainsaws. In 2014.

I don't have a god, so the PM's statement that woodchippers are using the forests as God wishes is a claim to a final truth that's above and beyond any I can make. As such, it is exclusive and anti-democratic. Forget considered argument, ignore science and counter-argument of any kind, forget the bushwalkers and the wallabies, forget that forestry employs 1 per cent of Tasmanians and tourism 15 per cent, forget democracy itself. I know how to rule Australia because I have God telling me. You do not because you do not.

The English philosopher A.C. Grayling wrote in Towards the Light: The Story of the Struggles For Liberty and Rights That Made the Modern West:

''The existence of free religious organisations in a free polity is potentially disruptive of it, given that they typically view themselves as possessors of final truth and are under obligations of various kinds to promote or prevent activities, or beliefs, or the passage of laws and the like, as enjoined by their faith.

''A religious person must always have a greater loyalty to what concerns the fate of his immortal soul than to a merely temporal power, and thus he is potentially at odds with the latter.''

This is the worry many people have about Muslim immigration and Islam's seeming incompatibility with democracy. Being a younger religion than Christianity, and not having had to suffer the Enlightenment, Islam is, demonstrably, able to make more demands on its adherents than Christianity. This makes its potential for being at odds with democracy that much higher.

It explains, furthermore, the long-standing suspicion of Catholicism in the many bygone kingdoms of Europe, her newer democracies, and in this country. Are you for Rome or Canberra?

In the US, it's a relative banality to namecheck God. The demographics demand each side of politics does it, whether they believe or not. But in Australia, namechecking God might be seen as a type of wedge issue. Labor is more atheist than the Coalition. The founding philosophers of socialism were almost all atheists. So to claim God's imprimatur in this country might be seen as a charge to higher ground, a place Abbott knows Labor cannot, with any sincerity, follow.

But the position for many Australians is that when you keep your god where democracy says he belongs, cosseted in his churches, we are able to ignore him. Once he is to be used as an instrument of policy, a trump card to end debate, our only option is to refute His truth. You have now brought your god to war, as it were. By using him as a spruiker for the destruction of the forests, you have made him our adversary.